Going Deep with Google and Wikipedia

Mackenzie Brooks

Assistant Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian

English Department Liaison

brooksm@wlu.edu // Leyburn M37

November 3, 2015

Agenda

• What is up with Google?

• Google search tips

• Search challenge activity

• What is up with Wikipedia?

• Wikipedia editing activity

How do you use Google?

Discussion question #1

When does Google fail?

Discussion question #2

How does Google work?

• crawling + indexing
• relevancy (200 factors) including:
  • PageRank
  • user context (location, history)
• KnowledgeGraph

What's the problem?

• Google is a business.
• It is a pervasive route to information.
• It is not objective.

"Rendering web content (pages) findable via search engines is an expressly social, economic, and human project—in which this goal is turned into a set of steps (algorithm) implemented by programming code, and then naturalized as “objective.”

Noble, Safiya U. "Google search: Hyper-visibility as a means of rendering black women and girls invisible." Blind Spots,” InVisible Culture 19 (2013).

Search tips

• Search tools
  • Any time
  • Verbatim search and " "
  • Location search
• Prefixes:
  • filetype:
  • site:
  • related:
• hyphen to exclude words "mustang -cars"
• asterisk wildcard for tokens

Search tips

Remember that Google tries to "help."

• Google doesn't care about:
  • +
  • ~
  • AND
  • OR
  • sometimes " "
• Sometimes it will drop your search term if the result has high enough relevance.
• Automatic stemming and synonyms

Search challenge

http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course/aps/introchallenge

• Working individually first, attempt to solve your challenge.
• Compare notes with your partner to see if you both got the same answer.
• Compare notes on your search strategy.

Discussion question #3

How do you use Wikipedia?

Discussion question #4

When does Wikipedia fail?

How Does Wikipedia Work?

• 5 million content articles since 200. 5th most visited site.
• Anyone can edit.
• Five pillars:
  • Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
  • Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.
  • Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute.
  • Editors should treat each other with respect and civility.
  • Wikipedia has no firm rules.

What's the problem?

• Neutrality can be hard.
• Less than 15% of Wikipedia editors are women. Only 15% of biographies on Wikipedia are about women.
• WikiProjects is a glimpse into what is missing.
• "The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs"
• CongressEdits

Things to know

• Wikipedia includes library authority data.
• Use the Talk section to see what projects claim that article.
• View History to see who and when changes were made, including previous drafts of the article.

Edit away!

• Create a Wikipedia account.
• Walk through the prompts.
• Check out the Community Portal for more

Wikipedia Tutorial

Wikipedia Adventure

Wikipedia training for students

Homework

Part 1: Google Search Challenge

Choose a different challenge than the one you completed in class. Solve the challenge. Document the steps that you took to reach that conclusion in a Word doc.

Part 2: Wikipedia edits

Make one minor edit to a Wikipedia article. This can be as part of your account creation, or you can go to the Community Portal and find an article to improve that way. 

Submit the URL for the contributions page of your Wikipedia account. You can include this in the same Word doc as Part 1.